Ev-Conv: Fast CNN Inference on Event Camera Inputs for High-Speed Robot Perception

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Event cameras capture visual information with a high temporal resolution and a wide dynamic range. This enables capturing visual information at fine time granularities (e.g., microseconds) in rapidly changing environments. This makes event cameras highly useful for high-speed robotics tasks involving rapid motion, such as high-speed perception, object tracking, and control. However, convolutional neural network inference on event camera streams cannot currently perform real-time inference at the high speeds at which event cameras operate—current CNN inference times are typically closer in order of magnitude to the frame rates of regular frame-based cameras. Real-time inference at event camera rates is necessary to fully leverage the high frequency and high temporal resolution that event cameras offer. This paper presents Ev-Conv, a new approach to enable fast inference on CNNs for inputs from event cameras. We observe that consecutive inputs to the CNN from an event camera have only <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">small differences</i> between them. Thus, we propose to perform inference on the difference between consecutive input tensors, or the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">increment</i> . This enables a significant reduction in the number of floating-point operations required (and thus the inference latency) because <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">increments</i> are very sparse. We design Ev-Conv to leverage the irregular sparsity in increments from event cameras and to retain the sparsity of these increments across all layers of the network. We demonstrate a reduction in the number of floating operations required in the forward pass by up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$98\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> . We also demonstrate a speedup of up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.6\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> for inference using CNNs for tasks such as depth estimation, object recognition, and optical flow estimation, with almost no loss in accuracy.